durably formed: like waters, they yielded to any sudden intrusion, but
closed instantly again. Early in life he had been taught that he ought to
marry an heiress for the benefit of his estate--his ancestral estate; the
restoration of which he had been bred to consider the grand object and
ambition of life. His views had been strangely baffled; but the more they
were thwarted the more pertinaciously he clung to them. Naturally kind,
generous, and social, he had sunk, at length, into the anchorite and the
miser. All other speculations that should retrieve his ancestral honours
had failed: but there is one speculation that never fails--the speculation
of _saving!_ It was to this that he now indissolubly attached himself.
At moments he was open to all his old habits; but such moments were rare
and few. A cold, hard, frosty penuriousness was his prevalent
characteristic. He had sent this son, with eighteen pence in his pocket,
to a school of twenty pounds a-year; where, naturally enough, he learned
nothing but mischief and cricket: yet he conceived that his son owed him
eternal obligations.

Luckily for Percy, he was an especial favourite with a certain not
uncelebrated character of the name of Saville; and Saville claimed the
privilege of a relation to supply him with money and receive him at his
home. Wild, passionate, fond to excess of pleasure, the young Godolphin
caught eagerly at these occasional visits; and at each his mind, keen and
penetrating as it naturally was, took new flights, and revelled in new
views. He was already the leader of his school, the torment of the
master, and the lover of the master's daughter. He was sixteen years old,
but a character. A secret pride, a secret bitterness, and an open wit and
recklessness of bearing, rendered him to all seeming a boy more endowed
with energies than affections. Yet a kind word from a friend's lips was
never without its effect on him, and he might have been led by the silk
while he would have snapped the chain. But these were his boyish traits